Wild Action

“You could do that? What about your job?”

He shrugged. Damned if he was going to admit he’d been such an idiot yesterday. “I’m sure I could work out some kind of leave.”

“That would be ideal,” Harris said. “Having someone with a vested interest helping out.”

“Why don’t you see about it right now,” Brown suggested, sliding his phone across the desk. “I’d feel a lot better if I knew things were arranged.”

Nick desperately tried to think of a reason for not seeing about it right now, but no divine inspiration came. So either he had to admit he’d quit his job— barely two seconds after saying he could take a leave from it—or he had to pick up that phone.

“Well?” Brown said.

Wishing to hell he’d been thinking more and talking less, Nick reached for the phone, punched in his own number and had a brief conversation with his answering machine.

“Done,” he said, clicking off. “I can take up to six weeks.”

The sick-looking smile Carly gave him said she wasn’t exactly thrilled about that—which he found darned irritating.

She needed help and he was offering to help her. Of course, he’d be looking after his own interests as well as hers, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that instead of being grateful, she looked as if she were racking her brain for some alternative solution.

“Is there a problem with this idea?” he finally asked.

Carly hesitated. There were several problems with it, but she did need someone. More specifically, she was pretty sure what she needed was a man with a deep voice. Like Nick’s. And her odds of getting anyone else on short notice…

She just wished she weren’t certain Nick would have a fit when he found out what he’d have to do. It was hardly a matter of helping out with horses and cattle.

“No,” she said at last. “There’s no problem. You just took me by surprise.”

“Fine. Then it’s settled. I mean, I’m assuming there’s a spare bedroom in the house?”

“Ahh…yes, of course. It has four bedrooms.” She reminded herself Nick was a police detective, which surely meant he wasn’t into rape and pillage. But that only alleviated one worry.

The scratch he was sporting hardly boded well for his ability to work with animals—in which case he might turn out to be more of a liability than an asset.

Just for starters, what if Attila didn’t like him? Or what if Nick was too frightened of the bear to try working with him?

For a moment, she considered telling him that was what she really needed help with. Then she decided she’d better save it for later. Nick obviously expected her to say something, though, so she asked if he knew anything about the movie industry.

“No, but I’ve always been a quick study.”

She managed a smile.

He gave her a warm one in return.

Roger and Bill were positively beaming.

But if the three of them figured this was such a great arrangement, why was her intuition saying it had all the makings of a catastrophe?

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_626045fa-ae76-5457-a255-195a087364e9)

Close Encounters of the Furry Kind

WHILE SHE WAS ATTEMPTING to get them out of downtown Toronto, Carly got lost so many times Nick stopped counting.

Instead, he started thinking that if she proved to be as good at running a business as she was at navigating, he’d made a wise move by deciding to stick around and keep an eye on his inheritance.

Their conversation was interrupted every time she pulled over to check her street map, which made it awfully disjointed, but by the time they found the Don Valley Parkway and were headed north, she’d managed to tell him a little about most of the animals they owned.

To his relief, the bear was the only potential mankiller in the bunch. Aside from Attila, there were the birds in the aviary, a couple of ponies named Paint and Brush, a parrot called Crackers and a few cats and dogs.

Oh, and she’d mentioned rabbits, as well, but they didn’t sound like much work. They wandered around loose, so it was only a matter of giving them food and keeping an eye on them. Similarly, Rocky, the trained coon, did his own thing at night and slept on the porch roof during the day.

Actually, Nick had assumed there’d be a lot more animals than there were, but when he told Carly that, she gave him a sidelong glance and said, “Trained animals all need to be worked with or they don’t stay trained. That’s where the agency part comes in. We have a lot of animals under contract that are owned by other people. Everything from lizards and snakes to tigers and an elephant.”

When she lapsed into silence, he immediately started thinking about the bear again. “This Attila,” he said. “How did you end up with him?”

“He was orphaned by a hunter—would have died if we hadn’t taken him in. He’d either have starved to death or been eaten by an adult bear.”

Bears didn’t exactly sound like charming animals, but Nick kept the thought to himself.

“So Gus and I bottle-raised him,” Carly went on, “until he got too big to live in the house.”

“Ahh. And he doesn’t mind being in a cage now? All by himself?”

“Oh, he’s not lonely. Bears aren’t pack animals, so he’d be on his own in the wild. And he doesn’t live in a cage. Gus didn’t believe in caging wild animals, and neither do I.”

“You mean…” Nick cleared his throat uneasily. “You mean, he wanders around loose? Like the rabbits?”

“Well, no. He’d find some of the other animals just too tempting, so he’s got a fenced field—with a pond to swim in and a bunker Gus built him for hibernating. We call it his cave.”

Nick nodded, wishing it was January instead of July. He’d be a lot happier if Attila was hibernating, because he had a horrible feeling a fence wouldn’t stop a six-hundred-pound bear that really wanted out of its field. But maybe it was declawed and detoothed and whatever.

When he asked, the look of utter horror on Carly’s face told him there wasn’t a chance. And he’d lay odds it was his forty-nine percent of the beast that included the claws and teeth.

Apparently, Carly did mind reading on the side, because she said, “There’s nothing to worry about, Nick. Attila’s a real pet.”

He nodded, but it was tough to get his head around the idea of a pet that weighed as much as three large men put together. “So…you’re not nervous working with him?”

“No, not at all.”

Without a doubt, that was the best news he’d heard since he’d learned they had a bear. He had every intention of doing his share of the work, for the next few weeks, but he’d be drawing the line at Attila. And that meant it was a darn good thing she had no problem with him.

Carly drove a little farther up the parkway, breathing a sigh of relief when she spotted the exit sign for the highway. She’d missed it more than once in the past and always had a devil of a time making her way back.

“I guess you’ve noticed I don’t have much sense of direction,” she said, pulling onto the exit ramp. “But I’ll be okay from here.”

“Good.”

“That’s how I ended up with Gus,” she went on when Nick said nothing more. “It was because I got lost.”